Archive for January, 2015

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It is no longer enough to be a movie star. Are you going to succeed as an actor in HOLLYWOOD, you should also be super star in social media.

Kjersti Flaa — ILLUSTRATION bendik kaltenborn (BYHANDS) Los Angeles/New York, United States “you hate bloggers, you make fun of Twitter. You do not even have a Facebook page. You don’t exist. You are invisible. Insignificant. ” In the film Birdman langer 26-year-old Emma Stone out against Michael Keaton, who plays her father; a has-been Hollywood actress as desperately trying to get his career back on track again. In a long, furious outbursts river the daughter into pieces what little he has left of confidence, for the page to help him create a Twitter account. His father’s entry into the social media ends with the fact that he inadvertently end up on YouTube running around in under the pants in Times Square. Only then add the world attention to him again.

-It’s an interesting phenomenon, “said Keaton when I met him in New York in conjunction with the premiere of the movie. -I’m not even on Facebook or other social media, and I feel that if one is not a part of the world, so you do not really exist. You are living in a kind of parallel universe. Keatons character attempting to revive the star status by setting up a play on Broadway. But it is the internet that does public relations work for him. -Today can all be stars. You can just go out on the street, do something incredibly stupid and post it on YouTube, “says Keaton.

CONTACT with the FANS — it is only in recent years that social media has become really important in the field of entertainment, “said Marc Karzen in RelishMix. The company, which itself is only three years old, measures the level of activity in social media for u.s. television and film companies and movie studios. Karzen tells us that all these studios takes the number of followers in the social media into account before they’d just hire an actor. -If someone had asked me about the importance of social media a few years ago, the answer would have been a completely different. At that time it was about talent, how to know the actor was and how they were to work with, so it is no longer. The movie business favors the big stars that have a direct relation to the fans rather than those who do not have it.

With Warner Bros./Village Roadshow’s American Sniper shooting down more box office records this weekend with an updated industry projection of $61.2M, another star-studded bomb went off at the B.O. following last weekend’s
mortdecai 3Blackhat debacle: Johnny Depp’s $60M R-rated comedy Mortdecai flatlined with an estimated $1.6M on Friday at 2,648 theaters, on track for a horrendous $4.6M weekend in eighth place – far below the $10-$12M that distributor Lionsgate was expecting for the OddLot co-production.

Mortdecai marks the second outing for both Depp and director David Koepp (who excelled at writing blockbuster scripts like Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible) after 2004’s $40M Stephen King adaptation Secret Window. That one also failed to send shockwaves through the B.O. with a final domestic of $48M. When Lionsgate and OddLot signed a co-financing deal in fall 2013, Mortdecai, based on Kyril Bonfiglioli’s 1970s novels, was trumpeted as one of the studio’s first projects. Depp made this bad decision after Lone Ranger opened in July 2013, and within weeks of wrapping Transcendence.

Three weeks before its opening, Mortdecai was showing tracking figures on par with Blackhat’s bottom dwelling figures. Both first choice and unaided awareness (when any person polled can cite any film title opening without being prodded by the pollster) were in the low single digits of 1-2%. Translation: It was on no-one’s radar, despite a heavy media campaign that launched six weeks out. Some highlights: Marketing integrations and sponsorships across 14 networks with nearly 100 million impressions, and custom vignettes of the cast on Comedy Central, E!, Bravo and TBS (specifically during Conan). A Mortdecai Twitter handle @PartTimeRogue was created six months out in the voice of the character collecting 21K followers (as a measure, Disney’s Lone Ranger handle had 16K while a Johnny Depp News site mortdecai 2has 74K). RelishMIX, which measures celebrity social media marketing, showed Gwyneth Paltrow as the lead social driver for the film (1.1M FB, 2M TW) as well as actress Olivia Munn (600k TW). Munn’s Conan interview, in which she comically describes Depp grabbing her breast during production drew 4M Facebook video views. There was also a promo celebrating Mortdecai’s mustache on shopping website The Art of Shaving.

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January 21, 2015

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ACTUALS, MONDAY PM: Warner Bros./Village Roadshow was slightly higher in the three-day actuals reported today with $64.6M and a $200.4M running domestic cume in its fifth frame (vs. yesterday’s weekend estimate of $64.3M and $200.1M). Originally, Warner Bros. was expecting to make $17.28M on Sunday, but their fall from Saturday was softer than anticipated, off 38% with $17.77M. Out of all the films on the charts, American Sniper posted the best per theater with $17,444.

Those moviegoers looking for lighter fare on the marquee shelled out $7M yesterday per Sony to Screen Gem’s The Wedding Ringer. That number puts the film in the neighborhood of a four-day of $23-$24M bow; enabling the film to outgross over the holiday frame. “It will be in the market for weeks to come and it’s a real money maker for us,” beamed Sony domestic distribution head Rory Bruer today. Added The Wedding Ringer producer Adam Fields, who was at the Hollywood Grove last night for the 8PM and 9:45PM showings, “The theaters were full, the film played great , audiences seem to love it, it’s a marathon not a sprint.” Also propelling word of mouth for The Wedding Ringer is its 76M social media universe led by Kevin Hart’s 18M Facebook friends and 15M Twitter followers per RelishMix. Sony will release exit demos tomorrow, but the perception is that The Wedding Ringer is a crossover title between Caucasian and African American auds.

Paddington, which has accumulated both a 98% Rotten Tomatoes fresh score as well as an A Cinemascore, made an estimated $4.8M Friday with an eye on $19.3M for FSS and $24.1M over the four-day holiday. Saturday biz looks to shoot up over 60% from Friday thanks to matinees. Per RelishMix, the kid pic has gained momentum from the film’s 24M YouTube viewers, 37M social media users as well as Nicole Kidman’s official Facebook page which has promo-ed the film to her 10M friends.

The one new release getting the short end of the stick on the charts is Legendary’s $70M Michael Mann titleBlackhat from Universal which might post a FSS outside the top 10 with an industry estimate of $4M at 2,567 screens.

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UPDATED FINAL, 2:03PM: Full Monday actuals per Rentrak are in, and the year’s box office, through 11 days, is at $379.4M, 1.1% behind last year (that’s $4.27M behind). What’s up? While it’s too early to sound the alarm; it turns out that this weekend’s haul of $126.57M — despite Taken 3‘ s great opening — was off 10% from the same frame a year ago, which minted $140.8M. For the most part, we can attribute it to the fact that we’re dogging Frozen‘s carryover from a year ago. While Lone Survivor‘s wide break made $37.8M during the second frame of January 2014, Frozen in its eighth weekend made $14.7M ($3.4M more than No. 2 Selmadid over its FSS).

In its fifth frame, Warner Bros.’ Paul Thomas Anderson film Inherent Viceexpanded to 645 locales, and it didn’t crack the top 10 on Friday with a projected $919K and it doesn’t look like it’s going to bust the top 10 over the weekend with an anticipated $3M. Weinstein Co.’s The Imitation Gamewent even wider on Friday, entering 812 more locations for a count of 1,566. The Alan Turing biopic looks to raise its cume to $40M by Sunday, led by a seventh Friday of $2.03M which only dipped 31%. Fox Searchlight’s Reese Witherspoon outdoor drama Wild will fly past the $30M mark by Sunday. Witherspoon’s performance as author Cheryl Strayed, who beat Mother Nature by hiking the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail, has garnered Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG noms. She continues to busily promote the film across her social media universe according to RelishMix with 1.76M Facebook followers and 302K Twitter followers. One component of Wild’s social media campaign has entailed spreading inspirational trail mantras from the film, such as this one that Witherspoon recently tweeted out: